After a whirlwind few months involving thousands of hours of volunteer help, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre’s new Home of Hope is opening its doors in Footscray.
Thursday’s opening will mark a homecoming of sorts for the centre and its founder Kon Karapanagiotidis, who established the ASRC in a nearby Nicholson Street shopfront 13 years ago.
The new 3000-square-metre home for Australia’s largest asylum seeker support service is triple the size of the West Melbourne premises the ASRC has called home since 2007.
Mr Karapanagiotidis said it offered an unprecedented opportunity to assist more than 4000 asylum seekers each year with health, counselling and legal matters as well as material aid and 100,000 hot lunches across the year.
“This opens so many things for us. On the one hand it allows us to help more asylum seekers than we could in the former building; secondly it allows us to create the asylum seeker innovation hub, a world first, a one-stop-shop hub that focuses entirely on freeing asylum seekers from poverty, unlocking their potential and enabling them to work.”
The centre will expand its education, mentoring and training and build open its food bank support.
Mr Karapanagiotidis said a 10-year lease with a further 10-year option meant the centre would be in Footscray for the long haul.
“We want to look at reaching out and working with the communities here, link back in and complement each other,” he said.
“This part of Footscray has been struggling and we want to be part of the revitalisation as well. We might even look at a night market in the area, who knows?”
Mr Karapanagiotidis said he was heartened by the wave of volunteer support that took the new home from a derelict office space to a welcoming space.
He said a lot Australians were ashamed and angry at what the government is doing in their name.
“Outside of torturing them there’s nothing left for this country to do to asylum seekers, we’ve thrown every form of cruelty we can at them.
“There’s a large section, millions of us, who do not agree with what is being done and we know there’s a better way.”
Central to this is the return of compassion, “the cheapest and easiest thing”.
“Giving a damn about someone and showing some love to someone costs nothing. Locking people up, demonising people and turning back boats, costs us billions, costs us our international standing, costs us the way we’re looked at by other people.”
Nevertheless, Mr Karapanagiotidis remains optimistic change is possible and Australia can once again welcome asylum seekers and refugees.
As hard as he finds the ill-treatment of asylum seekers in offshore detention camps, perspective and optimism keeps him going in his fight for change.
“What breaks my heart and what I bleed for is watching all these people around me who would give anything to stand for a moment in the shadow of our freedom and democracy and way of life, just to taste it for a second, yet we spend billions to damage and destroy these people,” he said.
“What keeps me going is I actually get to do what I love, I actually have the chance to create and be part of a movement of hope and humanity.”
